This invention relates generally to the generation of CAD files for customer use of products available from a supplier's inventory and more particularly to the generation of CAD files on the fly in response to a customer request for a CAD file of a desired product.
Engineers and product designers have become more dependent on the use of CAD files in developing new products. Often new products incorporate parts made by outside suppliers or vendors. Such parts are selected from an inventory of available products. The development time for new products can be greatly reduced by viewing CAD files of parts available from outside suppliers or vendors. Also, it is often desirable to incorporate CAD files of parts from vendors or suppliers into CAD models of the product under development. Preferably, the CAD files of the parts to be analyzed or incorporated into CAD models can be received from the outside supplier or vendor to avoid having to generate the CAD files of the parts from scratch. Many suppliers and vendors provide their customers and potential customers with CAD files of parts from their inventory. Additionally, even when all of the parts used in a product are made in-house, CAD models of the various parts are often developed by different programmers, engineers and designers within the company.
Often parts are very similar, varying only in size, capacity or the availability of various component add-ons. Typically parts are comprised of components which are combined into a final assembly. Companies that supply CAD files of certain parts to customers and to in-house engineers and designers typically generate assembly models of all of the variations of similar parts available in their inventory. Additionally, such companies generate component design tables for each of the components which are used in any of the variations of the part. It can be very time consuming to generate assembly models of each variation of a part using standard CAD modeling techniques. Also, each CAD model of a variation of a part needs to be stored.
The disclosed method of generating CAD files reduces the storage space required for all of the variations of models and reduces development time of alternative models. The disclosed method of generating CAD models permits a base assembly model of a part to be developed and models of variants of the part to be generated from the base assembly model. The sizes of various components of, as well as the availability of various component add-ons to, a part is often dictated by the selection of a very few controlling parameters. By identifying the controlling parameters, the information required to generate a CAD file can be substantially reduced. Various formulas can be established to generate the remaining parameters or data required for the generation of a CAD file based upon the controlling or driving data. A CAD file generating program is supplied the base model for a part including the driving parameters necessary to generate the driving data and the formulas necessary to generate the driven data from the driving parameter. The CAD file generating program is supplied the driving parameters for different part and impliments the rebuild function to generate a CAD model for the different part. The CAD generating program may be resident on a CAD server connected to a network.
Additional features and advantages of the invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon consideration of the following detailed description of illustrated embodiments exemplifying the best mode of carrying out the invention as presently perceived.